In Other Words 10/12/07

Friday

Oct 12, 2007 at 2:00 AM

Ellen Chahey

This month in history:

1285: The Jews of Munich have been accused of the ritual murder of a gentile. A mob attacks the synagogue on the Sabbath and demands that the Jews be baptized. When they refuse, the mob sets the synagogue on fire, killing all the Jews.

1290: The Jews have been expelled from England. A boat's captain offers them passage down the Thames to the coast. At the river's mouth, the captain tells the Jews to disembark for a rest on a sandbank. When the tide comes in, the boat sails off, leaving the Jews to drown.

1298: More than 140 German Jews are massacred, including the only Jewish family in the town of Heilbronn.

1492: Twenty-four Jewish men and women in Mecklenberg, Germany are burned at the stake after a priest falsely accuses them of desecrating a communion wafer. 1542: Twenty forcibly baptized Jews are burned at the stake in Lisbon, Portugal.

1648: Cossacks murder 6,000 Ukranian Jews.

1660: Another execution of Jews in Lisbon. 1704: This time an accused Jew from Lisbon manages to escape to England.

1726: Another Lisbon Jew is burned at the stake.

1746: In Lisbon, three Jews are burned in effigy, and three for real. 1905: Pogroms in several districts of Russia, including the cities of Kiev, Odessa, and Minsk. Jewish homes and shops are ruined; synagogues are desecrated; thousands are wounded or killed.

1919-20: More pogroms. 1938: Passports of all Jews in the German Reich must be marked with a "J." Viennese Jews, on the eve of Yom Kippur, are ordered to turn in the keys to their houses and report for deportation without passport to Czechoslovakia. In Vienna, synagogues and Torah scrolls are desecrated every day. Fifteen thousand Polish-born Jews are deported from Germany, causing the deaths of those who are old or sick.

1939: In central Poland, 13,500 synagogues are burned. The first deportation of Czech Jews takes place. The yellow star, distinguishing badge for Jews, is introduced.

There are anti-Jewish riots and shootings around central Europe.

1940: The Warsaw Ghetto is established. Jews are gassed in central Poland in specially designed trucks.

1941: Jewish professors in Utrecht, Netherlands, are removed from their posts. Two thousand Jews are shot in Poland. A concentration camp is set up in Yugoslavia.

Several synagogues are blown up in Paris. Jews are deported from Prague. Deportations and mass murders occur all over Nazi-controlled Europe.

1942: Much more of the same. Communities begin to boast that they are "free of Jews." Some Jews manage to escape to forests and form resistance groups.

1943: The Danish Resistance saves all but 500 of the 6,500 Jews in their country by sending them on fishing boats to Sweden.

Greek Jews are ordered to register. Greek Christians help to hide many. Sobibor concentration camp has an uprising. Two hundred Jews die but 400 escape. A thousand Roman Jews are sent to Auschwitz; only 16 will survive.

1944: Anti-Jewish violence in Hungary claims thousands of lives, and Adolf Eichmann sets up an office in Budapest, from which he begins to force Hungarian Jews into two large ghettos. An uprising of Jews in Auschwitz burns down crematories, kills a number of SS men, cuts through barbed wire, and flees. A few survive. Twenty mentally ill Jews from Venice are interned at the concentration camp Risiera di San Sabba near Trieste. By the end of the day, five or six of them have already been killed by the SS.

Had enough? Me too.

Seen the name of a country you love? Me too.

I got this sickening calendar from a book titled Every Day Remembrance Day (A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom) compiled by a man named Simon Wiesenthal, who spent 4 1/2 years in Nazi death camps, lost 89 relatives, and helped bring about 1,100 war criminals to justice -- including Adolf Eichmann.

Wiesenthal, now deceased, reports in his introduction to the book a story told to him by a former SS officer who turned witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials:

In the autumn of 1944, Eichmann was talking with several SS officers, who asked how many Jews had been killed to date. "About five million," he boasted.

"What will happen when the world asks about these millions of dead?" someone asked. Eichmann replied: "One hundred dead are a catastrophe; one million dead are nothing but a statistic."

All in all, the murder victims totaled 13 million, when you add to the Jews the Gypsies, the gays and lesbians, the mentally ill, the politically incorrect, and the uncooperative Christian clergy.

It's so overwhelming you have to return to one story at a time -- like the one in a letter to the Jerusalem Post in which the writer told of seeing his own father, and a little boy who was naked except for black socks, pushed live into an open fire: "When I was liberated and told people about this, no one wanted to believe me."

For all the "statistics," I'm going to be at Cape Cod Community College on Oct. 24 (1492: Jews burned at the stake), at 6 p.m., when the Academy for Lifelong Learning sponsors a screening of I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life & Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal, a film portrait of Wiesenthal's life and work, followed by a question and answer time with Rabbi Aaron Hier, head of campus outreach for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Organizers believe that their Cape screening may be the only free showing of this Cannes Film Festival entrant.

Please join me. As the Wiesenthal Center would remind us, for those who lived and for those who died, we must remember.

The Rev. Ellen C. Chahey is Minister of Spiritual Care at Federated Church of Hyannis.